


Chilton the Immortal

by MaryWisdom



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood, Cutting, Excessive Drinking, For Science!, Gen, Self-Harm, Spoilers for Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, also let's face it this is gonna end in Fred Squared, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 19:03:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12139056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaryWisdom/pseuds/MaryWisdom
Summary: It takes no less than three near-death experiences for Frederick to realize there might be more to it than sheer unbelievable luck.





	Chilton the Immortal

**Author's Note:**

> I will survive, live and thrive...

The first time he almost died, Frederick was a very lucky man, or so they kept telling him, and so he believed. Lucky to have been kidnapped by a surgeon as skilled as Abel Gideon and not, well,  _himself_. He woke up in the hospital after doctors had spent hours trying to put all his entrails back where Gideon had found them. By all accounts, it was a miracle he survived.

Alana Bloom sent a card, as did some of his other colleagues from the hospital and even some of the staff. Jack Crawford sent both a card and flowers, cheap ones, and that was as much of an apology Frederick would ever get from Jack for not offering protection from Gideon sooner.

Freddie Lounds, surprisingly, delivered her card personally, together with a little fruit basket. She wanted to know how he was doing and they chatted for a while, but she never apologized for helping Gideon abduct him. Then again, she never asked for an interview and did not post pictures on her infuriating blog (which Frederick definitely was _not_ following almost obsessively), and he figured that was probably her version of "I'm sorry".

All things considered though, Frederick had other problems, because suddenly he had to worry about tons of dietary restrictions, and standing up straight alone hurt like a bitch in the spot where his kidney used to be. At least it hurt at first. 

***

The second time, everybody agreed that Frederick was truly the luckiest man alive, but he could not help the nagging suspicion that there was more to it.

By sheer divine intervention the bullet had missed everything vital and had exited his skull after "merely" shattering his cheekbone and most of his top left teeth. The vision in his left eye was impaired when he woke up, and the fresh scar was a huge swollen red mess, but hey, at least he’s alive, the doctors told him, and shouldn't he feel lucky about that?

For the first couple of weeks Frederick lay alone in his hospital room and pondered the miracle of his survival, trying to remember his anatomy lessons through a mist of painkillers, and whether or not there shouldn’t have actually been major blood vessels and maybe even his spine in the bullet's trajectory. The cards took longer to arrive the second time, and Frederick hated to think about how many people had been so eager to believe that he was a cannibalistic serial killer. There were fewer cards from the BSHCI staff this time too.

Jack Crawford was one of the few people who visited him before he was officially cleared in the press, and he even apologized to him and explained their further plan to lure Hannibal. It had been a stupid plan from the start, but Frederick's jaw was still wired shut, and so he was, regrettably, in no position to warn Jack about what he was getting himself into. Miriam Lass actually showed up and tonelessly explained to him how sorry she was. She never looked him in the eyes and got out of his room as fast as she could. Later, Freddie paid him a visit too. She brought organic applesauce and brought him up to date on what had happened in Hannibal’s kitchen, but this time she was also after an interview.

***

The third time was when Frederick truly realized luck had nothing to do with everything that had happened to him. Nobody ever learned about this time.

It happened shortly after he had been released from the hospital after he had been shot. He had actually wanted to celebrate that night – his copyright of “Hannibal the Cannibal” had just become official, he had even finally agreed to have that interview Freddie Lounds had been pestering him about – and had gotten a bottle of the good wine up from his cellar. But one bottle had become two, and in the end Frederick had sat all alone on the sofa, pitying himself and crying. He knew the third bottle was a mistake; getting a fourth was pure stupidity, and he saw that even at the time, but what else was there? It took him five minutes to even get up from the couch. He knocked over a table with an expensive crystal vase on his way to the basement stairway, giggling a little because he had never liked it anyway. At the top of the stairs he stood, frowning, while trying to work out which foot went first. He was not sure which one he decided on in the end, but whichever it was, it was the wrong one. Frederick slipped and tumbled down the stairs before smashing into the glass wine shelf at the bottom.

He woke up hours later, when the sun was almost rising again. He had the headache from hell, the rest of his body was one single dull ache, and he did not know where he was. When he finally started to remember, he groaned. If serial killers were not trying to get him, he just _had_ to be his own worst enemy. Who needed Hannibal the Cannibal (©) when he himself did such a good job at trying to get himself killed?! He contemplated staying right where he was, at the bottom of the stairs (oh what a glorious metaphor for his life!, he found), in the darkness and a puddle of spilled wine for the rest of his miserable life, but eventually he decided that he would not be comfortable giving Freddie Lounds her interview in his current position. Groggily, he righted himself up, arms curiously stinging as he put weight on them, and reached for the light switch on the wall.

The light revealed a world of red. But it was not wine. The cabinet he had smashed into had been for whites. Only one bottle had broken and spilled.

"This is too much blood," Frederick thought, but immediately countered that it could not be too much because he was obviously still alive. Frantically, his eyes darted left and right in search for other bodies; it would, after all, not have been the first time people had been killed in his house. After not finding anybody else, he calmed down enough to reason that he must have cut himself and the blood must have mixed with the wine. But a closer look only made him come to the same conclusion as before – there was way more blood than one could afford to lose and survive, and not nearly enough wine.

Finally, Frederick looked down at his body. He did not understand what he was looking at, not even after staring at it for a whole minute. His right shirtsleeve was ripped open and soaked in blood, and there was fresh scar tissue, thick and red, on his upper arm. He carefully ran his fingers along the almost three inches long curved line running along the inside of his arm, and winced. It was still sore. There were more fresh scars on his lower right arm too, but thinner and not quite as sore. Confused, Frederick stared at the multicolored shards of broken glass still lying at his side, covered in blood – _his_ blood – and at the bright red splatter pattern on his now soiled shirt and the wall. He must have cut himself when hitting the shelf, or while unconsciously rolling around in the glass, must have clearly cut deep enough to hit an artery. So why was he still alive? (Not that he was complaining.)

It was, scientifically speaking, impossible. But except for the slowly subsiding headache, feeling very tired, and a peculiar lightheadedness, Frederick was feeling fine physically - a lot better in fact than he had in weeks!

He could have sat there staring a his new scars for hours, possibly without ever finding a clear explanation. But Freddie Lounds was going to be here soon, and while he was contempt with giving her the damn interview, he was not going to let her see him like this. His next actions seemed automated; he dragged himself back up to the second floor and showered, cold, and washed all the red off him, and with it most of the shock seeing this much blood in his home again had given him. What he was most in that moment was curious, and this curiosity grew with each stroke over the fresh scars on his arms. His mind was racing, but it could not make sense of what had happened, much less so when he went back to the basement to clean up the blood and discovered that it had seeped under the door to the party room Hannibal had refurbished to frame him. There was no way in heaven or hell one human being could lose that much blood and live to clean up the mess.

He postponed his interview with Freddie indefinitely because he was “not feeling well” (definitely one way to put it). She was slightly pissed, but Frederick had other things on his mind. After he shut all the blinds on his windows, he sat down in his kitchen with the same knife he used the night before to uncork the third wine bottle in a drunken state of wanting to feel badass, weighed it in his hand, set it down again, stared at it. Stared at his arms. In the few hours since he had woken up, the scars seemed to have paled and thinned.

Frederick wet his lips nervously, then grabbed the knife and ran his thumb over the blade just hard enough to draw blood. He wiped the blood off on a napkin, unable to suck it off – thanks to Miriam Lass he had swallowed enough blood for two lifetimes. Before this day he had never paid much attention to how long minor cuts and scratches took to heal on his skin, but when the cut had already closed again by the time he raised his hand, he knew very well that this was not normal.

Frederick cut himself several more times, longer, deeper, at different angles. But the wounds started healing immediately, and all were closed after a couple of minutes. He figured out that if he concentrated on them they healed faster. When he held his hand over the flame of a lighter and made the angry red blister disappear in the span of about twenty minutes, Frederick abandoned all hope of finding an ordinary scientific answer.

But so many pieces fell into place: the unexplainable bone fragments the surgeons had found in his bullet wound that seemed to be from a vertebrae, but none of his was injured; the cane that was resting in the corner of his bedroom, not used in a while now, even though his physical therapist had predicted he would need it for the rest of his life; the story his mother had told him of when he fell out of the window as a 4-year-old and was found without a scratch six floors down; the time in college when he was pretty sure he had accidentally drunk half a bottle of bleach after a party and all that happened was that he slept for a whole weekend. In that moment, when Frederick realized that the number of his “near”-death experiences was much higher than originally thought and could not help but come to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, he was most likely immortal, he could do nothing but laugh out loud until his throat was sore. It stayed sore for a grand total of ten seconds.

***

So when the fourth time came along, what Frederick was most was inconvenienced.

After discovering his unnatural gift, he had decided to quit his job and take a long vacation for several reasons: firstly, he had been quite sure he would be fired anyway, and at least this way it was his decision; secondly, he could not make use of the full extent of his powers with nosy neighbors and an even nosier tabloid journalist showing up at his door at all random times, snapping pictures of him every chance she got.

In a secluded, but comfortable cabin somewhere on the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains Frederick healed his facial scar to the point where it was easy to hide with makeup, and the exit wound on the back of his neck to where it looked like a pale rash. Since those injuries were well documented in the news he did not dare to make them disappear completely, like he did with the scars from his fall. All that was left of them were very thin lines not quite his normal skin color; he himself could only make them out in the right light and if he squinted. He did not bother with the scar Abel Gideon had given him because he had gotten somewhat used to it, and, again, it had been written about in the papers. While he could not do anything about the discoloration in his left eye, he was able to restore most of his vision.

He learned that his powers, useful as they were, were not limitless and took time. Most often, he learned the hard way. Broken bones took about 8 hours of focused concentration, or two days if he slept and watched Netflix and only kept the healing at the back of his mind (curse that slippery carpet at the top of the stairs!). He already knew he could heal most flesh wounds in under an hour. Regrowing tissue took longer, he discovered when he accidentally cut off a good piece of his fingertip while peeling potatoes. And these rules most likely did not apply to life-or-death situations; Frederick figured it must be linked to adrenaline.

He knew he was not invincible though. For example, he doubted he could regrow a whole extremity. Well, maybe he could, but he was sure it would be extremely painful and require a lot of time and concentration. He was tremendously surprised when he experimented with growing another set of teeth where the bullet had shattered his, and actually succeeded; however, the process of forming eight new teeth in his jaw hurt enough to make him pass out, and even then what happened was comparable to a small child teething – quite irritating and with lots of drooling.

Frederick had no explanation for the origin of his powers. They worked best if he concentrated and consciously used them, which somehow explained why it had taken him so long to figure out he even had them. He could not ask his parents, since they had been dead for quite some time now. All that told him was that his abilities had probably not been inherited. And the fact that he did not look older than he had on his 39th birthday _over fifteen years ago_ was most likely not due to good genes – well at least not in the common sense.

Once he got used to the idea of immortality, it became another factor that made Frederick not ask for his job back: if he really did not age and could heal himself of most injuries, it would only be a matter of time before somebody discovered the discrepancies in his medical history. Frederick had spent too much time in hospitals over the past few years – he did not want to end up as a lab rat in some hidden military base dedicated to dissecting freaks. He was less likely to be found out without a steady job, and the cabin in the woods proved to be very inspirational for his writing of _Hannibal the Cannibal_.

He had considered going to hunt Hannibal down, but had decided against it because immunity to death did not equal immunity to pain. He had better things to do, and his time would come when he inevitably outlived Hannibal Lecter.

And so now, Frederick lay in his tube, back at the hospital, hoping that none of the doctors decided to screen his inner organs and find out he had managed to regrow enough of his kidney and intestines to eat meat again. When nobody was looking, he tapped his fingers against the glass impatiently, wondering how long it would take them to release him, so he could go back to his cabin and start growing back his burned skin and mutilated lips. His whole body was one big hot blister and he was glad for morphine because his burnt off nerve endings had grown back before he had been able to stop them. The skin on his head was itching where the hair was just waiting to grow back; Frederick now knew that he could not just speed up his healing with concentration, he could also slow it down to what he believed was almost normal speed.

What his healing factor could, unfortunately, do nothing about were the traumatic memories. When the Dragon had abducted him, fear still came natural, regardless that Frederick knew he could deal with whatever damage the beast would inflict on him. Well, Dollarhyde had outdone himself nonetheless though.

The skin grafts were taking well, no surprise there. He had told Alana what he thought of her and the – _what did Freddie Lounds call them? Ah, yes_ – the Murder Husbands. Whatever the FBI still had planned at this point, it was a disaster waiting to happen. None of his concern though – he had different problems on his hands right now.

“You really have no luck at all, Dr. Chilton!” Freddie gave a small sympathetic smile as she set down the bouquet of purple amaranths on the end table.

Frederick glared at her for a moment, but what he said was, “’e should sto’ neeting like this, Niss Lounds!”

Freddie nodded and picked up his cheesy line with a wink. “People will say we’re in love!”

He tried to smile as best as he could; she could hold his gaze much longer than most people who came to visit or check on him, and her company was much more interesting than lying around alone all day and listening to the radio blaring in the background (he was going to personally sue the bastard who allowed _Ring of Fire_ to be played in the burn unit).

Freddie pulled up a chair and told Frederick everything about Hannibal’s and Will’s great escape, how Jack Crawford finally, irreversibly lost his job, and how the Murder Husbands slayed the Dragon before disappearing off the face of the earth. She read him her latest article and pulled up pictures. She “accidentally” took a selfie of them both, and offered to read him some more. He told her to buy a book, any book, at the hospital store and read that to him (“Sur’rise ne!”). She came back with _Fifty Shades of Grey_ and did a dramatic reading that ended with both of them crying tears and wheezing, and the nurses coming in to tell her wheezing was not at all healthy in his condition.

“Nonsense,” she said after they had left. “Your lungs didn’t burn for a reason – put them to good use!” Frederick was glad his charred face made it hard to read emotions because that was not quite true: he had inhaled a lot of smoke and hot air that had indeed singed his lungs, but the doctors believed differently because the damage had healed before they had even gotten him into the ambulance. He had coughed up dark grey slime for a day or two, but had otherwise no trouble breathing.

He noticed her watching him from the corner of her eyes and wondered if she was suspecting something. After all, she was the only one who had come to see him in the hospital each time.

“You know, I can hook you up with somebody from Guinness World Records,” Freddie offered after a couple rounds of Sudoku. “They’d pay good money for your story. Certainly enough to cover your medical bills.”

Frederick shook his head a little too violently and made his skin sting. This time Freddie definitely looked suspicious. He had pushed it too far – a snarky eye-roll would have conveyed his opinion of that offer perfectly, but the headshake had made it pretty obvious that he was hiding something.

“Okay, then. Maybe not.” She smiled, unsettling, but left it at that.

***

The first chance he got, Frederick informed his doctors that he would continue treatment at a specialized facility overseas, and that he had arranged for transport himself. They only agreed to discharge him, lipless and with still healing wounds, if there was someone to take care of him. Only one name came to his mind.

A little girl stared at him while he waited for his ride. “Just a little longer,” Frederick thought, “I just have to deal with this a little longer!”

Freddie Lounds was almost a bit too eager to pick him up and help him into her car – wrapped almost from head to toe in soon-to-be-useless pressure garments and bandages, and with a mask covering his mouth. She smiled and told him about all the things he had missed in the news, including possible Murder Husbands sightings. He only listened with half an ear; he wanted her to drop him off at his place as fast as possible, so he could get into his car and drive to his Appalachian Mountain lodge and finally begin to heal himself.

About halfway to his place Freddie noticed he was not paying attention and stopped talking. She stayed silent until they reached their destination.

“Sure you’re going to be okay?” Freddie asked as he got out of the car.

“Yes, I can take it ‘rom here,” he assured her and tried to smile even though she could not see it. “Thank you, ‘reddie. ‘or e’rything.”

She nodded and helped him take what few belongings he had had with him in the hospital out of the trunk. When she got back into her car, she suddenly said, “You know, we never did reschedule that interview back then…”

Frederick sighed and rolled his eyes. “What, do you seriously still ‘ant one?”

Freddie tilted her head and watched him with a small curious smile. “I’d love one, Frederick. But I’m not sure anyone would believe me if I told your story.”

Before he could reply, she had closed the door and driven off, honking twice as a goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Guess what, folks, I started writing this on August 31 2015! So yeah, there is hope for all my unfinished fic yet.  
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
